


strange how we know each other

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Loneliness, Water Spirit, kaze and saizo are sad and awkward, precanon shirasagi feat. naiad!azura instead of hostage!azura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 21:38:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9091750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: The day Kaze found a girl in the lake, he had been waiting for his brother to come home.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merewiowing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merewiowing/gifts).



The day Kaze found a girl in the lake, he had been waiting for his brother to come home. Although it would perhaps be more truthful to say that she found him, and that he’d been pretending he wasn’t waiting.

He was crouching by the water’s edge, splashing his face, letting the sweat of a few sun-warmed hours prowling the castle grounds trickle away into the water. His brother Saizo had left at first light, to ride with his liege the eldest prince in the western border patrol. Kaze had walked with him to the main courtyard—walked _behind_ him, as was his wont, always trailing a step or two, never quite shoulder to shoulder—and lingered to watch the men, the restive, prancing horses, Prince Ryoma standing tall and rigid as a pillar of iron in the center of it all and Saizo drawing up by his side.

Kaze had stood half in shadow, waiting until the last rider had long since passed the high gates, until the clatter of hooves against the stones had faded to an echo too distant even for his sharp ears. Then he’d turned on his heel and gone back inside, looking to make himself useful in the kitchens or the stables. He was not strong like his brother, occupied no important position in the royal house, but he had a gentle voice and a steady hand, and he said yes to even the most menial, the most thankless tasks. That was enough, it seemed, for the people in the castle. It was enough for him, he told himself, at least for now.

If nothing else, chores distracted him from thinking about how the men on horses had been sent out with increasing frequency this past season, or what it meant that the crown prince and his retainers now rode with them more times than not. On the one hand it seemed like a matter of course; the crown prince would be king one day, and any king worth his salt would have needed to know his land from end to end, how its people lived, how best to protect it. But on the other hand, the west meant Nohr, and Kaze had heard whispers among the men in the barracks about monsters come from the other side of the great river that cut like a swordstroke through the center of the continent, constructs of dead flesh and dark magic that functioned only to kill. The crown prince and his ninjas, for all their strength, were only human. Prince Ryoma and Saizo and Kagero daughter of the oldest clan were nearly of an age.

But today was quiet, so quiet the stewards had run out of chores to give him by midafternoon, and so Kaze had had no choice but to remove himself to the outer grounds to soothe the fire in his head. He never swam in the lake, and he had never before come as close to it as he did on this day. He had never seen anyone else in the lake either until today, when he leaned back blinking the water from his eyes and saw her hair, the light blue skeins of it floating and fanning out around her. Then the curve of a head, pale skin, such eyes as he had never seen in a human face—and there was something too familiar in those eyes, wonder and terror at once, twins to the panicked fluttering sensation that took the breath from his throat and sent him reeling back across the grass.

The girl— _girl_ was the first word in his mind, though he knew even as he thought it that she could not possibly be just that—had moved too, backward and out into deeper water with a cry that pealed like a bell in his ears, ducking her head underwater so rapidly anyone else could have written off her appearance a mere trick of the light. In that moment Kaze did not think to do the same, to dismiss the apparition as merely something he’d imagined. In that moment, he didn’t think at all—dismantled, barely breathing, he found his feet and ran.

 

* * *

  

He’d heard stories, growing up in the mountains, about the water people. In the next days, Kaze took to the trees, watched, and did his best to remember.

They lived in sweet water—springs and lakes and streams—and did not cross into the sea. In some stories they were terrible to look upon, bodies ridged with scales and clawed fingers tapering to needlepoints. In some stories they were merely voices, hollow and bodiless and echoing in the night, because no one who looked upon them face to face ever returned. They called people to the edge of the water to pull them in and drown them—young men and women and children, the ones with the brightest faces and the purest hearts.

But he had never heard a single story about someone like her, the girl in the water who only surfaced when she thought she was alone, human in shape but for a few small details. The skin too smooth, too fair. The long hair rippling under the surface as though it had a life of its own. Gold and amber and sunlight through water in her eyes.

She had a voice, too, the undulating rise and fall of it strange and beautiful, but he had never heard her call anyone to the lake’s edge. Instead, she sang.

Many times as the hours grew long and the days lost themselves in one another he tried to reconcile all of these things, and found each time that he could not. When evening fell he climbed down from the tree and returned to the castle to light the lamps in time for his brother’s return, and though Saizo’s eyes followed him from shadow to shadow Kaze could not bring himself to speak of where he had been.

 

* * *

 

He was lucky the day he came and found her already with her head above the surface, floating near the shore with her back to the bank, almost as though she had been waiting.

He had heard her singing on his walk here, made his steps quiet and feather-light over the high grass. Perhaps it was the sound of her voice that had made him brave—made him foolish enough to walk all the way to the water’s edge and call out to her.

“Please, milady.” The words caught at the inside of his throat, but he was lucky—the wind picked them up, carrying them out onto the water to her. “Don’t go deep, just yet. All I want is to know your name.”

Even from a distance he could see how the water moved as she moved, and how her long, long hair rippled and folded around her, moved by its own current just beneath the surface. He could see her face, so clear in the midday sun—see the confusion sketched across it giving way to wonder, twin to the stirring that had started in the pit of his chest.

“My name is Azura,” she said, and there was some echo yet of a song even in her speech. “What is yours? The trees are in your hair.”

 

* * *

  

It had not been a lie for him to say, after he had returned to the lake to talk to her for some days, that he was not afraid of her. He did not yet know how to tell her that it was the water he was afraid of.

He had not told her—indeed, had not told anyone—the story of the day he nearly fell into the river that sliced through the mountainside below the village. His mother had sent his brother out for herbs that only grew on the bank. He had not needed to follow, but had chosen to—always wanting to follow, always wanting to go where Saizo went. They were only children then, eight winters each to their names, and he had been wholly absorbed in watching his brother’s back. His feet did not know the ground, and were not quick enough to save him on their own when he stepped down just once in the wrong place, slick stones and loose earth crumbling out from under him.

There had not been time to cry out. It was all he could do to reach out his hands, hoping Saizo would be quicker—would turn around, see him—and sure enough, faster than light he was there. One hand braced on an outcrop of rock, the other clamped around Kaze’s forearm, reeling him back up with such force that he slammed into Saizo and they tumbled to the ground, arms clutching, not letting go.

That night they had faced their father and the whip; in Igasato the careless paid for it most often with their lives, but those who were lucky enough to survive such mistakes were not spared the pain that would teach them how to live. And Saizo had prostrated himself before the head of the clan—sometimes their father—and told him in a voice that did not tremble, “I made Suzukaze go down to the water with me. His lashes are mine.” Kaze, on his knees in a corner of the room, watching the torchlight throw shadows onto his brother’s back and the harsh planes of their father’s face, found that the cold of the water had seeped into his bones and drained him even of the strength to contest the lie.

(Later he would press a poultice to the wounds crisscrossing Saizo’s skin, whisper “Forgive me, forgive me” under his breath. Saizo would grit his teeth and answer only “You are not to follow me anymore,” iron in his voice.)

Since that day he had not told anyone, not even Saizo, that he had never come out of the river. Suzukaze was fifteen and for seven years he had held the river in his dreams, the current and the ground crumbling away beneath his feet and his brother’s nails digging into his wrist the only thing between him and the dark under the roaring, roiling froth.

Sometimes he told himself that if there was anyone in this world he could tell, it was her, even if he did not yet know how. He was afraid, but she was of the water, and he had already begun to believe that nothing about her could ever hurt him.

 

* * *

  

“You would have died,” Azura said, once he had finished telling her the story and fallen silent as the very stones on which he sat, near to her but not too near, “had he not caught you.”

Kaze knew this, of course. All his life since that day he had known it. “But he did.”

“But he might not have.” She spoke in such a way that told him she was aware, moreso perhaps than he might have been himself, of how easily one thing could have become another. What a fragile thing his life was—how it barely belonged to him at all, in the end. “He carries the shadow of your death with him. That’s why he can’t look at you, and why he will not talk.”

Every day now Saizo rode out of the castle town by the prince’s side, returning with the darkening of the sky and the lighting of the lamps, but he never spoke to Kaze about monsters. He never spoke to Kaze about anything that happened on the western border, or about the whispers that the shadows were growing long in the kingdom of Nohr, stretching their long clawed fingers east. He told his brother only not to waste time worrying so much, it would not come to war as long as the queen was alive.

Kaze knew all of his brother’s titles like the shape of his own hand. Saizo the fifth, protector of Igasato, youngest-ever head of his clan. Spymaster, firestarter, retainer to the crown prince. All of these things first and Suzukaze’s elder twin somewhere in the space between. He found, then, that he could not remember a time that things had not stood this way—such that he knew nothing about his brother more intimately than the shape of his back and shoulders, turning always toward someone, something else, squared with rage and fire and resolution against the weight of the world into which they’d been born.

“Perhaps he tells himself it is better to have nothing,” Azura said. “That’s easier than remembering he still has you, and what losing you would mean.” She’d smiled at him then, soft and sad, and looked for a moment as though she would reach out and touch her fingertips to the back of his wrist, but she did not. “You are the same way, I think. Wanting to believe you have nothing.”

She had told him some of her own stories, though always in fragments, apologizing over parts she could not explain or did not remember. Something about a kingdom sunk the bottom of the great river, about people—not people. Family, disappearing into the shadows in the deep. About how all the waters of the world were connected, and how the current had led her here when she had nothing left. She was the last of them, she said, the only one who had not become water and disappeared, though she could not tell him how.

 

* * *

 

“I would ask you a question, Azura.”

By the time he had gathered enough courage to sit by the very shore of the lake, letting his bare feet trail in the water, Kaze had stopped counting the days. His hands, however, remained by his sides—sifting the dirt between his fingers, pressing down into it with his fingertips, reluctant still to let go of the earth.

“You may ask it.” Sometimes during these conversations Kaze had seen a peculiar light bloom in her face, a curve to the corners of her quiet lips, and wondered why such a thing had never appeared in any story he’d ever heard. “We do not lie nearly so much as you might think.”

He bit his lip, lowering his eyes to the place where his feet disappeared. It was difficult, still, to look at her for too long, though he had yet to decide if it was because of what she was, or simply because he thought her beautiful.

“Will you eat me, if I go into the water with you?”

“We do not eat the flesh of humans,” she said, eyes flashing. “Are your people not the ones who fish the lakes and rivers for food?”

“For _fish,_ yes, but we never—” He let the words trail, suddenly realizing what she meant, seeing as though for the first time the faint shadow of his fear in her own face. “We would never—”

He realized only belatedly that the sound that rang out at his words and stopped them in his throat, chiming and crystalline, was her laughter. He was laughing along with her, too, before he could even think to try and stop it, the sound bubbling up from out of a deep place inside.

“My turn to ask you a question,” she told him, after, when breath had returned to them both. “Why do you want to go into the water?”

Kaze did look at her then. Because she had not lied to him, he felt he owed her the truth—what may have been, in that moment, the only truth that mattered.

“To be nearer to you,” he said.

 

* * *

 

The day Kaze entered the water for the first time in seven years, the girl who had come out of the lake was waiting for him, hands outstretched and a smile like the setting sun on her lips as the sky turned rosy with dusk behind her. When the ground fell away from beneath his feet he reached out for those hands and found them strong and sure—and it didn’t matter, then, that he did not know how to tell her that speaking with her had made him brave, that much braver than he had been. In all the ways that _did_ matter, perhaps she already knew.

 

* * *

 

They were hand in hand, still, fingers entwined as though the contact would keep them afloat, when Kaze looked up and saw the first stars coming out above the treeline. Azura’s eyes followed his, marking the color of the sky, unraveling for herself what it meant and where the time had gone.

“You need to go,” she said.

“My brother will be home soon.” Kaze, in his breathlessness, could do little more than whisper the words. Just as well—because sound traveled fast across the water, especially with the wind blowing landward, and she was a secret he was not quite ready to share, yet. “I need to light the lamps.”

“Will you come again?” Her eyes had strayed from his face as she spoke, fixed themselves on something behind him as they began to drift slowly back toward shore.

Kaze didn’t need to turn his head and look over his shoulder to know that the lighting would have started by now, the outer wings of the palace and the high gates and the ramparts already beginning to come alive with fire against the gathering dark. But the inner rooms toward the rear, the parts of the castle where the shadows were thickest and no one walked but him and his brother with Kagero between them, and the others from the clans who came and went so furtively he never even saw their faces—those parts were his duty. No one would bring light there, if not him.

“Tomorrow,” he told her. “And any day after that I can, I will come.”

The girl in the lake had taken him at his word, smiled, and released him. And Kaze had caught that smile in his hands and held it before him as he pulled himself from the water, her sunshine eyes following his path up the bank, through the long, wet grass, toward home.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place in a slightly altered version of the canon universe in which the bottomless canon is instead a huge river and Valla is an Atlantis-like sunken kingdom, and its people are essentially naiads, of which Azura is the last. Sad lonely naiad meets sad lonely ninja boy, and the rest is history.
> 
> Credits to Rowan for the central premise of this AU and for the veritable huge suitcase of story material that takes off from it that has yet to exist anywhere outside of our heads because we feel too much.
> 
> Dedicated with love to Rowan as well, because no one yells about these two as much as we do but I still feel so much.
> 
> Title from Vienna Teng's "Eric's Song."


End file.
